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5 wonders of the mobile world

Those clever mobile phone makers keep coming up with more techno titbits to keep us enthralled. Some weird, some wonderful, some useful and some inane

22 January 2006/6:00GMT

Those clever mobile phone makers keep coming up with more techno titbits to keep us enthralled. Some weird, some wonderful, some useful and some inane. We give you our top ten from around the world.

1. Top of the pops today is news that over in Detroit you can get your cinema tickets on your mobile. You don’t just buy your ticket with your phone – pah! That would be old news! No, you actually get a bar code which is scanned when you enter the cinema. Course you need a colour-screened internet-enabled phone – but by the time it hits these shores everyone will have one of those, right?

2. Oh this one’s a gem. Samsung’s E530 helps ladies keep tabs on their biological clocks so one can check what time of the month it is. We wonder whether the phone has a ‘period alarm’ so we can all be warned before PMT strikes. See Samsung’s website for more details about the menstrually sympathetic lady phone.

3. Samsung unveiled its Dual DMB phone the SPH-B4100 (above) at CES. It’ll be the world’s first mobile phone to get digital and terrestrial telly. But it only comes out in Korea in December so when it cruises over here is anyone’s guess. We’ll keep you posted.

4. Closing in on 4 is O2. If you’ve got an O2 phone you can get bidding on eBay with its iMode service. You can get eBay on smart phones too, but without the fancy formatting. With 02 everything actually looks like eBay so, handily, you’ll be able to tell what you’re bidding for.

5. You can now pay for your parking ticket on your mobile in major cities like Dublin, Sydney and Edinburgh – yes they’ll do anything to make sure you pay up. This isn’t really much fun but if it gets the whole experience over a little quicker then we give it the novelty thumbs up.